Hooray for Hollywood! (No, Really.)

The system is broken. High-quality, mid-budget prestige movies are an endangered species. Television is better. Audiences are fleeing. Film is dying. Sequels are ruining everything. These are some of the familiar objections that surface whenever critics, media journalists and other entertainment pundits take stock of the big picture, an appraisal that often turns into agony over the (inevitably worsening) state of the art and industry. What everyone agrees on is that “they” don’t make movies like they used to.

Except of course when they do. The American movie business is strange, contradictory, exasperating and sometimes infuriating, yet somehow, miraculously, it continues to create enough work to fill the top 10 lists that critics compile at the end of each year. Those movies are too often treated as outliers. But as we emerge from a summer of broken box-office records into a crowded, cautiously promising fall season, it’s time to take another look at how and when this system does work — at least well enough to produce movies that satisfy public and critical appetites and that make the continued case for cinema as the most vital and significant mass art.

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CreditHarry Campbell

Because for all the changes in the on-demand, multiplatform, streaming, fluid entertainment media world, the one constant is that the movies continue to have a profound hold on us. And they hold us the way they have for the past century — with visual style, narrative techniques, bigger-than-life stars, human stories and familiar genres — except that where once the studio biopic mythologized Madame Curie it now does the same for Ice Cube. The movies entertain us, bore us, transport us, move and enrage us, divert us from the world’s problems or inspire us to solve them. They remain, in other words and in spite of everything, one of the sublime pleasures of modern life.

It’s with that in mind that we greet another new season with a provisional and heavily qualified (subject to various terms and conditions and revocable at any time at the sole discretion of the parties herein) Hooray for Hollywood!

MANOHLA DARGIS In 1941, the New Republic film critic Otis Ferguson wrote that “Hollywood is a state of mind — but whose?” It’s a question worth asking repeatedly, partly because we tend to refer to Hollywood as if it were a coherent, junk-spewing monolith, when in reality it’s a mess of contradictions peopled by suits and artists. The system, its rituals, players and networks of power, is different from what Ferguson wrote about. The studios are now owned by multinationals for which movies are a modest part of the corporate equation — Disney, for one, makes more from its parks and resorts than its studio entertainment, which in turn feeds its parks and resorts. Yet much remains the same, including this thing — call it a place, an idea, a set of conventions — that somehow makes good, bad and the occasional great movies.

The hold that the big studios have on hearts, minds, wallets and screens makes them logical targets. There’s much to complain about, yet to see the business monolithically can smack of the kind of barbarians-versus-the-rest-of-us rhetoric that high-culture snobs once deployed against the studio films. Ferguson rejected that. He saw films as being near to life, which is why he wrote that Hollywood was “the state of mind of the whole country peering at and reading about it.” That’s still true. The industry has never been a top-down enterprise; as the audience, we make the movies, too. And while we can dismiss “Avengers: Age of Ultron” as product, I’m guessing that at the end of 2015 more people will remember the moment they fell in love with “Inside Out,” which is near to life.

A. O. SCOTT Are you trying to make me cry? “Inside Out” sure did. I wonder if any of the serious live-action Oscar aspirants lined up trunk-to-tail like circus elephants from September to Christmas will have the same effect. Not to prejudge what are no doubt some very worthy biopics, literary adaptations and Socially Relevant Dramas, but it’s worth marveling for a bit longer at what happened at the movies in the past few months.

Standard complaints about the summer still hold — it’s full of sequels and reboots and world-saving men with superpowers — but the summer of 2015 also upended some conventional wisdom about Hollywood and movie audiences. For one thing, those audiences were supposed to be dwindling, seduced away from the multiplexes and art houses by the cornucopia of visual entertainment available on their phones, laptops and wall-mounted, hi-def plasma screens. But this year attendance was up, and box-office grosses were way up, making this summer the second richest ever in raw dollar terms.

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Saoirse Ronan, center, in “Brooklyn.”CreditKerry Brown

One big winner was Universal, which has grossed more than $2 billion domestically so far this year. None of its releases involved superheroes, even if a few of them (“Minions,” the mighty “Jurassic World”) could be described as franchise movies. And not all of these were masterpieces. But there’s no doubt that Universal led the pack in releasing movies that people were eager to see, to tell their friends about and to see again.

These included “Trainwreck” and “Straight Outta Compton,” which beat expectations and also taught Hollywood and the entertainment press a lesson periodically learned and too often quickly forgotten. Women go to the movies! Black people, too! And, more than that, movies that reflect the demographic reality of the world we all inhabit can have very wide — and profitable — appeal. Which is only to state the obvious fact that a lot of the ticket buyers for “Compton” were white, and a lot of “Trainwreck” fans were men.

And a lot of the summer’s most exciting movies — “Inside Out” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” among the blockbusters, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “Grandma” among the indies — have been about women. It goes without saying (although it’s always worth saying again) that Hollywood remains a hotbed of sexism and retrograde gender politics, especially where the hiring of women directors is concerned, but there does seem to be something of a shift underway. This fall, amid the difficult-man dramas and great-man biopics, there will be a decent smattering of woman-centered movies: Todd Haynes’s Cannes-beloved “Carol,” starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara; John Crowley’s “Brooklyn,” starring Saoirse Ronan; and Sarah Gavron’s “Suffragette,” a movie about actual historical feminists with Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep. We’ll have the latest James Bond adventure, but also the last “Hunger Games” episode.

DARGIS The big studios deserve to be repeatedly lashed for their lack of diversity, but it’s also true that change is inevitable partly because of the country’s shifting demographics, and that it has already begun on screen and off. An Aug. 25 report from the Directors Guild of America states that there’s been what it calls “modest improvement” in the number of women hired to direct for television and the Internet. This may be because, as the report puts it, “the pie is getting bigger” — i.e., the entertainment media business is booming, as suggested by the 10 percent bump in episodic television in 2014-15. More episodic television may (may!) translate into more directing jobs for women, even if showrunners like Jill Soloway (“Transparent”) remain frustratingly rare.

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Elizabeth Banks and Hailee Steinfeld on the set of “Pitch Perfect 2,” directed by Ms. Banks.CreditRichard Cartwright/Universal Pictures

There are more women than ever making movies, if only in the independent world, where it helps if a director doesn’t pay her cast and crew much (if at all) and keeps her ambitions as modest as her budget. So it’s notable that women directed two of this year’s studio hits, “Pitch Perfect 2” and “Fifty Shades of Grey,” two more titles that are straight outta Universal. No one suit can take all the credit, but these movies — along with the last “Fast and Furious” and “Straight Outta Compton” — were made under the watch of Donna Langley, the chairwoman of Universal Pictures. Ms. Langley, who has sat on Universal’s diversity council, seems to be helping make multiculturalism profitable, which may be one reason Ice Cube, a producer on “Compton,” has called her the sixth member of N.W.A.

SCOTT When we look at movies from the business side, we tend to talk about the studios and the various companies that fall under the “indie” rubric: surviving studio specialty divisions like Sony Pictures Classics, veterans like IFC and Strand Releasing and newer players like Oscilloscope, Drafthouse Films and A24. And it’s often noted that middle-sized nonfranchise movies are being squeezed almost out of existence, that the industry is split between the very big — the globally released, audience-gobbling franchises — and the very small, which increasingly means movies that will be streamed and downloaded more than they are seen in theaters. Is that a dismal picture? In some ways, yes. I wish more ambitious directors had budgets of $20 million or $30 million for their dream projects.

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Joy and Sadness in “Inside Out.”CreditDisney/Pixar

But a lot of ambitious directors are managing to do very interesting work. The demigods of previous golden ages are still with us. Between now and Christmas we’ll get a Cold War thriller from Steven Spielberg (“Bridge of Spies”), a western from Quentin Tarantino (“The Hateful Eight”), a period melodrama from Mr. Haynes (“Carol”) and a biopic (of all things) from Danny Boyle (“Steve Jobs”). Those are just the movies consecrated by festival buzz and industry hype. And just the movies that are projected in theaters. The expansion of television beyond cable and the networks — the arrival on the scene of Amazon, Hulu and Netflix — has encouraged some remarkable creative migration and cross-pollination. The war movie “Beasts of No Nation,” for example, unites two HBO standouts: Cary Fukunaga, who directed the first season of “True Detective,” and Idris Elba, who played the entrepreneurial outlaw heartthrob Stringer Bell on “The Wire.”

Not only among directors and writers, but perhaps most important among actors. It used to be that an actor either used television as a steppingstone to movie stardom or turned to it when the big movie roles weren’t there. Now that hierarchy is almost entirely gone. This year Oscar Isaac (to name one of my favorites) has gone from the art-house sci-fi mindblower “Ex Machina” to David Simon’s HBO mini-series “Show Me a Hero” to the next “Star Wars” installment in December. He’s hardly unique, but his career is evidence of the extraordinary quality and range of screen acting today.

DARGIS So it’s the worst of times, the best of times all over again, even if it’s mostly just changing times. The diversity of work from across the globe and on big and small screens is as astonishing as it is overwhelming. And while creators and consumers have each embraced on-demand as an ethos, people still go out to see movies. A few years ago I worried that movie theaters faced mass closures, as when television swept the country in the 1950s, another era of industry crisis and change. But there are 40,000 movie screens in the United States. I don’t like much that plays on those screens, but the movies aren’t dying. As always, they are mutating.

And in a sense the movies are bigger than ever as every television program that aspires to cinema shows. Some of the biggest are bummers, but some are not half bad, or are pretty decent or even great; like the terms art-house movie and foreign-language film, comic-book movies and blockbusters are categorical distinctions, not qualitative ones. There are too many of both, sure, and even superfans may be losing interest, as the dismal returns for “Fantastic Four” suggest. But the industry chases a sure thing until the audience says “Eh,” which is why dozens of musicals were released in 1930 and why stars once wore spurs and now wear capes. These behemoths will keep coming because they can produce boffo box office, and, when they don’t, it may not matter: Disney’s earnings, buoyed by its parks and television offerings, jumped 21 percent the year “John Carter” tanked.

These movies will also keep coming because, as the French director Olivier Assayas observed not long ago, the blockbuster is “the most coherent representation of the world” in which the audience lives. “Fast and Furious” proves him right, I think. And that brings me back to Ferguson, who argued on behalf of Hollywood movies, and saw art and life where others saw trash and propaganda for the masses. The big studios, which have outsourced production to independent contractors for decades, produce and release far fewer features than in the classical era. Yet despite this and in spite of the industry’s panic and our complaints, and despite the on-demand fever, the studio bean-counters, the media consolidation, the banality and the cartoons, movies are made that, yes, come near to our life.

SCOTT Well, good, then. We can stop complaining. Just kidding! But we — by which I mean critics, journalists, kibitzers and fans — can perhaps at least make sure our complaints are local, specific and historically grounded. O.K., that probably won’t happen either. Movies are always changing, and change is upsetting. Superhero movies may be ascendant now, but if (as the old school franchise auteur Mr. Spielberg recently predicted) they go the way of the western, you can be sure their demise will be roundly mourned by future nostalgists.

But at least as striking as Hollywood’s appetite for novelty — and more essential to its continued functioning — is its continuity, its conservatism, its regard for tradition. We are talking, after all, about brands that came into being early in the 20th century. We are also talking about genres that have proven remarkably durable even as their styles and points of reference change. There used to be biopics about the likes of Cole Porter and Louis Pasteur; now they’re about Stephen Hawking and N.W.A. Amy Schumer, Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are screwball heroines with filthier mouths and more active libidos than would have been allowed under the Production Code. Today’s melodramas now frequently include the sufferings of gay and transgender characters, but the tears they solicit have the same chemical composition as those provoked by lovelorn women in the weepies of yore.